For the last eighteen months, Sax Persson has been sitting on the biggest secret in the gaming industry. On the fourth floor of a drab, red-brick office block in the centre of Redmond, Washington State, Persson and his colleagues have been building the next version of the second-biggest-selling video game of all time: Minecraft.

Even inside Microsoft, which bought the studio behind Minecraft in 2014, news of the plan has been restricted to a small group of employees who were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements before becoming part of what was known internally as Project Genoa. Once they were in, staffers were told where Persson planned to take Minecraft next.

His idea was to bring Minecraft into the real world at an almost unimaginable scale. He wanted to hide mines beneath pavements, fill parks with in-game creatures and tuck exotic treasures away in unexpected places so gamers would have to search high and low to find them. And he wanted this new game to be played by more than the 91 million people who already log on to Minecraft every month.

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The result is Minecraft Earth, a standalone augmented reality version of the game that combines some gameplay elements familiar from Pokémon Go with others that are uniquely Minecraft. To create it, Persson and his team spent a year-and-a-half working out how to pin down holograms with near-centimeter precision in the real world while negotiating the even trickier task of staying faithful to a game loved by its legions of fans because of its lo-fi aesthetic, non-existent instruction manual and absorbingly open-ended world.

If he can pull it off, Persson – Minecraft’s creative director – will have caught lightning in a bottle for the second time in the game’s ten-year history. For him, Minecraft Earth is only the second brick in what he hopes will become a 50-year franchise. And to parlay the runaway success of the first game into something even bigger, Microsoft is betting that augmented reality is ready to come of age as a gaming platform. But will Minecraft fans agree?

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In adventure mode, players will be able to interact with Minecraft worlds overlayed on the real world

Microsoft

The first time a player boots up a new game of the original Minecraft, they are dropped into a randomly-generated world made up entirely of one-metre-square blocks. They might find themselves in a desert, or a forest, next to a vast ocean or on a mountainside but eventually they learn that by hacking away at the scenery – first with their limbs and later with hand-crafted tools – they can break down the environment into items that can be used to build things within the gameworld.

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Then, invariably, they die. In Minecraft, days and nights last ten minutes each. While the days are ripe for exploring and building, at night zombie-like mobs – Minecraft parlance for in-game creatures – chase players, attacking them or exploding on sight. With no in-game tutorial or warning, first-time players must learn the hard way that at night the best option is to find or build a secure dwelling, block up the entrance and wait things out.

“It's the antithesis to many modern games that are very prescriptive, but to reach a high fidelity you have to put the blinders on and follow a specific path,” says Persson, who joined Microsoft in August 2009, just three months after the very first version of Minecraft was released by its creator, Markus Persson – no relation to Sax. Wearing a dark black jumper and with a thick tattoo wrapped all the way around his right wrist, Persson speaks while fiddling with a set of Lego bricks – a staple feature of Minecraft meeting rooms.

The open-ended nature of Minecraft means that the game is mostly a creation of the player’s own imagination. Some build painstakingly precise replicas of Cologne Cathedral or Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. Others use redstone – the game’s version of circuitry – to engineer random maze generators or complex systems full of traps and obstacles. On YouTube, which does a roaring trade in Minecraft videos, players share their creations with tens of millions of subscribers – videos of the game were viewed 80 billion times in 2017 alone.

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But the impenetrable interface and complete lack of guidance are also the game’s biggest weaknesses. “The people who stay, stay for years,” says Persson. “But the people who churn out do so almost immediately because the game is pretty unforgiving.” If a player manages to survive two days on the trot, odds are that they’ll stay with the game for years.

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This stickiness has been a big part of its success. Unlike most games – which start with a bang and fizzle out slowly – Minecraft has gotten more popular every year since its release. When Microsoft bought Mojang, the Swedish studio behind the game, in 2014, it already had 31m monthly players. “Prevailing wisdom then was that Minecraft had peaked,” Persson says. “Now we’re three times bigger than we were back then and nobody is more surprised than us. That’s just not a gaming lifecycle thing.”

Part of its post-acquisition success is down to Microsoft’s goal of trying to get Minecraft on as many devices as possible, and making sure that players could play online with each other across most of them. Now versions of the game are on 20 different devices, including consoles, desktops, mobiles and virtual reality headsets, with many people installing the game on multiple platforms. While it was doing all this, Microsoft released a version of the game specifically for schools, cementing the idea that – in a world where games are often presented as violent and addictive wastes of time – Minecraft was that rarest of rare things: a good game that was also, well, good.

If 2014-18 was the era when Microsoft consolidated its Minecraft fiefdom, 2019 is all about expansion. Fifty per cent of all 9 to 11-year-olds in the US play Minecraft, but Persson’s mind is on the other half, and the masses of people who quit the game shortly after picking it up, turned off by its baffling gameplay.

Messing with the core game to make it more accessible was always off the cards. “Why is there no tutorial? Because it’d ruin the game,” says Persson. “You have to feel it – it’s a game of consequence.” Instead, intrigued by a 2015 on-stage demonstration of Minecraft being played in augmented reality – intended only to show off Microsoft’s HoloLens headset – he started thinking about how to put Minecraft into the real world, in a version that would satisfy casual gamers as well as hardcore fans.

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In the interim, the number of smartphones capable of running augmented reality apps has skyrocketed. There are now just under one billion such devices, according to one estimate. In July 2016, Niantic released Pokémon Go, which changed everything, eventually surpassing more than one billion downloads. What used to be a technologically-frustrating gaming niche increasingly started to look like the next big platform. “The investment that the tech giants are making in AR is tremendous,” says Torfi Olafsson, Minecraft game director at Microsoft. “Three years ago all you could do was put a 3D model on the table and spin it, now we can be immersed in the models.”

If Minecraft is to reach to reach the next 91 million players, there is only one obvious platform – the phone they already had in their hands. In 2018, Persson took Mojang’s chief creative officer, Jens Bergensten, out into Stockholm with his phone and talked him through what he imagined for the game. “We just walked around Stockholm just riffing on what the concept would be on a blank phone,” he says. “Then I went home and I said 'I don't know how to make that’.”

Microsoft

When he first walked Bergensten through Minecraft Earth, Persson imagined that the augmented-reality Minecraft world would be a mirror-image of the real world. Trees would be transformed into their blocky equivalents, lakes would be fishable and virtual skyscrapers would loom next to real ones.

Soon, however, he realised that a Minecraft alternate reality wasn’t quite the right direction for the game. “That’s a bad idea,” he says. Instead, he decided the game would be based around adventures – small slices of the Minecraft game world, usually no more than 32 blocks square that are tied to a precise geographic location, and viewable to players through their mobile phones. Once they’re in, players can mine a location for precious resources, fight and kill hostile creators or build their own creations in the augmented reality world.

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These adventures can be played by groups of people at the same time – with your in-game name floating above your head as it does in Minecraft online. Once your group has mined the adventure of all its resources, or killed (or bred) the mobs within, the adventure would reset itself for the next group, and eventually change into another adventure altogether.

But Persson’s insistence on people being able to play together in the augmented reality game world poses a tricky problem. How do you place the virtual world precisely enough so that ten or 20 people can interact with it at the same time, even though they’re looking at it through different devices and from different angles? Pokémon Go hadn’t presented a similar problem as the Pokémon players tried to catch simply appeared wherever they pointed their phones. It wasn’t interactive exactly, more like the real world but with a Pokémon filter – which led to many people simply switching off the battery-draining augmented reality mode altogether.

Olafsson was insistent that with Minecraft Earth, augmented reality couldn’t feel like an optional extra. “I think this is the augmented reality killer app,” he says. Olafsson and his team plan to use players’ own phones to anchor the augmented reality adventures in the real world. Say the in-game map indicates that there’s an adventure in the middle of a local park, near a fountain and next to a clutch of trees. The first person ever to wander up to that adventure might raise their phone, and point their camera at the trees. The game’s software turns this image into a feature map – a 3D representation of the real world that looks like a bunch of floating dots – sends that reference back to Microsoft’s servers and loads the adventure in front of the player.

The next time a player comes along, they might point at the fountain instead. The same sequence of events plays out over time, but this time Microsoft compares the new feature map with the others it has crowdsourced from earlier players, and places the adventure according to where it was positioned before. While for the first few scans, the position of the adventure may shift, over time it will be locked down in space. The idea is that, even as the seasons shift, snow lays on the ground and the leaves fall off the tree, Microsoft servers will have enough datapoints about the real world to be able to place that adventure in precisely the same spot every single time a player loads it.

“Those are massively different environments, but a Minecraft hologram still needs to be in the same place,” says Alex Kipman, a Microsoft technical fellow who worked on Minecraft Earth. Whereas GPS and Wi-Fi fingerprints have error margins of metres – that’s why the blue dot on your map jumps around when you can’t get a good signal – Kipman needed the adventures to be placed with near-centimetre accuracy so that when a group of players took on an adventure together, they could be sure they were tackling the exact same game world.

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Choosing where to place those adventures, however, presented a different kind of struggle altogether. The Minecraft Earth game map is derived from open-sourced OpenStreetMap data, and divides the world into several billion equally-sized chunks. By tracking where people are playing the game, over time Minecraft Earth will algorithmically populate the world with these adventures. If plenty of people walk through a park while playing, for example, the game engine will lean towards dropping an adventure en route, but it’s unlikely to drop one in the middle of the Atacama. Certain areas – such as prisons, or roads – have been deliberately excluded from the algorithm’s consideration by the Minecraft Earth team.

Using player data and algorithms to shape the game world doesn’t just save on internal brain power, it should lead to a more enjoyable experience, says Jesse Merriam, Minecraft’s executive producer. Wherever someone is inside Minecraft, they should have at least one adventure and two-to-three tapables – resources that players unlock by tapping on a map icon – in the world nearby, he says. Merriam is keen on taking things slowly, and learning by trial and error. The game will be first released as a beta this summer, limited to a number of players that Microsoft expects to reach into the hundreds of thousands, and some of the features described above will only make their way into later versions of the game. The beta will be 18+ only.

Microsoft

The Minecraft offices in Redmond (there is also a Mojang office still in Stockholm) are a testament to Minecraft’s transition from a best-selling video game into a formidable franchise. In the corner of the boardroom a Minecraft-branded bedspread spills over some cardboard boxes, beside it a glass cabinet is stuffed with Minecraft LEGO sets, stuffed toys and books while a pinata modelled after a Creeper (a kind of hostile mob that explodes after it touches a player) sits forlornly in the corner. A Minecraft film, directed by Peter Sollett, is slated for release in 2022.

Although the core game – despite frequent updates and expansions – has drifted surprisingly little from its original form, Microsoft has made a concerted effort to move it away from its controversial creator, Markus Persson. In November 2014, Persson left Mojang after selling his company to Microsoft for $2.5bn, and in subsequent years his tweets veered towards the alt-right, transphobia and sexism. In a March 2019 update to the Minecraft’s opening sequence, Microsoft removed a reference to Persson and the firm later confirmed that he would not be invited to a conference marking the game’s tenth anniversary on May 17, 2019.

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In Redmond, those involved with the game talk about it as something that has transcended any one creator. Instead of game designers, they describe themselves as stewards, taking care of the Minecraft brand before handing it off to the next generation. If you’re planning on building a 50-year franchise, after all, you might start to feel a little less precious about keeping score of who created what, and who gets to decide what Minecraft means.

For Olafsson, the game director, Minecraft Earth isn’t exactly the second version of Minecraft – it’s more of an adaptation. “The world certainly doesn't need Minecraft Two, but the Minecraft universe is expanding for sure,” he says. For 18 years Olafsson worked on EVE Online, the hugely popular space-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game, so he is familiar with the demands of fans who feel deeply invested in a game. With Minecraft Earth, he has tried to strike a careful balance – trying to open the game up to new players without diluting it so much that fans think it is a betrayal of the brand.

That’s why Olafsson puts such an emphasis on fairness in the new game. In the original Minecraft, highly-prized resources, such as diamonds, are exceedingly rare. If players come across them, it’s because they’re spent dozens of hours hacking deep into the earth to find them. Olafsson wants Minecraft Earth to reward that amount that effort too.

“When I go through the effort of collecting 100 blocks and finding a diamond, if you can magically get a diamond – either through cheating or some bad game mechanism – that totally negates my effort,” he says. The app will be free to play, but in-app purchases, he said, would be true to this philosophy – rewarding people who invest time and effort into playing the game.

To achieve this, every resource in the game will need to be traceable back to its source. That’s one of the reasons why the game always requires a data connection – Olafsson doesn’t want players finding loopholes that give them access to resources they haven’t earned. “For things to have value there has to be some notion of scarcity, and some notion of effort,” he says. “When things have meaning, your actions start to have meanings as well.”

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Actions must have meaning, but they have to be fun as well, Persson adds. “The only goal is that everybody should play the game and you should all play together.” More so than Pokémon Go, Minecraft Earth is a game designed to be multiplayer. Microsoft has connected most of the people already playing Minecraft, and now it wants to repeat the trick in the real world. “That’s what the game is made up of. These small moments of social negotiations, and the shenanigans that come from when people have different opinions about what should happen or they band together.”

But getting there will require a large dose of humility. “If your goal is to make a mark on something, you can’t be a part of this. This game is much bigger than any of us,” he says. Although he has been responsible for spearheading the biggest Minecraft release since the game was launched ten years ago, he’s aware that it was really Minecraft’s players who took the concept of an endlessly alterable game world and ran with it. Now with a new game that rebuilds itself in real time in response to player behaviour, it’ll be down to Minecraft fans once again to work out what place in the world the game really deserves.